The standard-issue alien abduction thriller gains a few paranormal touches and a taste of the
living dead in
Dark Skies.The film is a passably chilling bit of nonsense that builds on the tropes of
the genre and relies on them for the odd jolt and the occasional ironic laugh.

Yes, the aliens are abducting us, but only those of us who didn’t heed the warnings of
Signs.

Keri Russell and Josh Hamilton play struggling suburbanites — she is a real-estate agent, he is
an unemployed architect — who suddenly face weird lights, weirder noises, nightly kitchen
rearranging and unseen threats to their two boys to go along with a battered marriage, long-term
unemployment and a mortgage in arrears.

Dark Skies is about how they and their confused kids handle the situation.

Not very well, as you might expect.

Lacy (Russell) hears things and sees things. She is at a loss to understand what took all of the
items out of their kitchen cabinets and parked them in precarious stacks all the way to the
ceiling. Daniel (Hamilton) is less credulous.

He is fibbing to her about his job interviews, and she isn’t telling him everything that is
going on at home, such as how little Sammy (Kadan Rockett) keeps having nightmares about the
sandman.

The lies come out and the marriage earns its ugliest test when they come face to face with the
impossible. The movie sinks or swims not on our belief that this is happening to them, but on the
players’ beliefs, and neither adult gets frantic or worked up enough to be convincing.

At the very least, the first time Lacy spies a spindly alien from
Signs standing over her child’s bed, her freakout should be epic. Both actors play muted
shock, not panic.

And panic was called for.

As episodes pile up — catatonic fits, mass bird crashes into their house, strange bruises on
their kids (Dakota Goyo is Jesse, the oldest) that have the neighbors sure they’re nut-job child
abusers — you would expect a mania to set in. Daniel and Lacy can manage only confusion, and
solutions borrowed from
Paranormal Activity (surveillance cameras),
Night of the Living Dead (barricading the windows) and every other modern horror movie
(Internet searches, where “the truth,” or at least the conspiracy, is out there).

That last step delivers the movie’s most fascinating character, an “expert” (J.K. Simmons) on “
visitations” whose resignation and exhaustion at their fate, which mirrors his, seems earned. Lacy
and Daniel seem beaten before they start.

Visual-effects man turned writer-director Scott Stewart has turned away from the
Legion and
Priest D-movies with their angels and vampires and patched together something of an
expertly shot and cut mash-up. He is good at managing tension, and the script doles out the
requisite shocks at decent intervals.

But what’s missing is the sense of parents terrified for their kids, a terror that the viewer
would share — if only we had been given a reason to care or a surer sense that Mom and Dad do.